What Do Users Really Think Of The New Google Design?

When Google started testing the new look for its search results pages which ditches the shading behind the ads and replaces it with yellow “ad” icons, contradictory outcries of this sort began popping up,

“Ad click-through rates are going to plummet because the ads are too obvious with those bright icons.”

Google made the transition to the new look official last week. The other changes that came with the update are the removal of underlines, larger title fonts (and shorter titles) and evenly spaced line height.

Source: Usertesting.com

The team at Usertesting.com set up a usability study to find out whether users respond differently to the new design, which Google says was aimed at improving legibility and freshening up the page with a cleaner look

The sample size is small at just 50 participants, but the results are still interesting.

First, users were shown each design version separately and rated how easy or difficult it was to tell the paid links from the unpaid links. The scores were tied, yes absolutely tied. The icon-minus-shading made zero difference to the users that were polled.

Old Google Score: B (87.2 percent ), Avg. Score: 4.36 (out of 5)

New Google Score: B (87.2 percent), Avg. Score: 4.36 (out of 5)

The scores were also tied when users were asked to look at the two versions individually and rate how easy or hard it was to read the links.

It was actually the change in line spacing that generated a higher approval rating for the new version. The old version received a score of 87.6 percent while the new version managed a 90.8 percent.

When users were shown the two versions side-by-side, however, and asked which version helped them determine which links were paid and which were unpaid, the new version won out. Just over half of respondents (26) said the new version was more effective, while only 12 found the old format more effective. The other 12 had no preference.

Overall, the new version was preferred by 33 of the participants, who called it “clean”, “fresh” and “uncluttered”. So, from a users’ perspective, it would seem Google set out what it aimed to accomplish. However, advertisers and SEOs will continue to examine the business impact these changes make for quite some time.

About The Author

As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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It would have been very interesting if, before showing both versions, respondents were asked if they noticed a change in the look of the page.

Matt McGee

Me too, Durant. :-)

Enomo Eatho

Now its shows only 53 characters in Title Tags.. I don’t How we going to target’s the keywords here after 65 to 70 is good one.

Brad Roberts

not a fan

Armand21

The general consensus from what we are hearing and seeing, and let’s be truthful here, it’s a terrible layout. Remember the old days, when you came across a website with large fonts and how terrible it looked? Well, the same applies today, and there is nothing worse than seeing titles cut-off or having to word-wrap them.

The design has ‘Gone Back In-Time”…

shurikenlord

The font still bring me cringing to be honest. At least FaceBook changed theirs.

http://www.it-sales-leads.com/ Barbara Mckinney

This new design will surely have a huge impact to SEOs. No matter how they strive to work hard in order to be on top in search ranking, the paid ad will have an edge and will be easily noticed by the users because of that bright icon.

http://myapple-ipad.co.uk/ appleipad

TBH i am finding this research a bit hard to believe. We are one of the biggest job boards in the world and our CTR on organic listings has fallen over 4% since this release was done with a similar increase in our PPC listings. The new design clearly favours PPC atleast for us :).

It will be great of there is a wider discussion on this with actual website owners. I am sure the results will be quite different then.

http://www.albertlau.com/ Albert Lau

Agree. I see similar result too… The new design is clearly benefiting Google P&L. CTR increased for adwords.

François-Xavier de Crevoisier

I really would like to see the same kind of study on the french version where there is not just a “tiny icon” named “ad” there is a big one with “Annonce” on it…

adrian

oh dear.. what a flawed study.
The study was to show how people can spot paid links.. conducted on google users, who have used google, most likely on a daily basis, for several years, and who already instinctively know where google ads are and always have been.

‘Can you spot where the google ads are on the old google layout’?
‘Yes, the same place they have been for several years’

FFS. Engage brains before constructing and conducting a pointless survey.

http://aremi.me/ Caspar Aremi

I like the new version a lot. It was weird on the first day – several of my colleagues were speculating on what was ‘wrong’ with Google, as we were all aware something was different but we couldn’t put our fingers on it. Now it’s been a week or two, it just seems normal.

Art Thompson, Jr.

How is this design any different than the previous from a purely paid placement standpoint? The paid ads are still at the top just like before. Regardless of how they’re rendered there was never a way for organic results to trump paid listings. This means the impact on SEO of how the ads are rendered is zero.

We should be asking if the shorter titles will impact SEO.

hGn

Showing now only 53 characters is simply no fear. At least try they should try to reduce the space between letters, there is too much white space.

http://www.it-sales-leads.com/ Barbara Mckinney

When you search for a certain keyword the first thing you’ll notice is the bright yellow color of paid ads. If I am the user I will surely click the link on its side. Unlike before even if paid ads are located on top of the ranking, we do not easily get distracted because its almost the same as the others. Did you get the point? Let’s face the truth, SEO nowadays are getting harder because of this kind of changes made by Google.

Art Thompson, Jr.

Barbara, I guess I’m just falling to understand your point. It sounds like you are suggesting that it’s the yellow icons next to the paid listings and not simply their placement at the top of the SERP that will get users to click those instead of the organic listings. I can’t say I agree with you, but neither of our opinions really matter, do they? Let’s see some more research other than this obviously flawed study and then discuss those results.

Organic results will never rank higher than paid ads, so our SEO job is essentially still the same: to get our organic listings to the “top” of the first SERP. I won’t argue with you that it’s gotten harder. But, if it was easy then “anyone” could do it, right? ;-)

The one thing that does bother me about the new paid listings is the removal of the header that previously stated “Ads related to [insert keyword here]” which I felt better informed the user than these tiny “Ad” icons. I seriously doubt Google would have implemented these changes if they had a negative impact on AdWords CTR. It is their core business after all.

Art Thompson, Jr.

Thanks for sharing this, appleipad. Still a small sample (>25) but precisely what I was intimating above with regards to impact on AdWords CTR. I’ll go ahead and predict here that there will likely be a break-in period with users learning how to “read” the new SERP layout resulting in fluctuations in traffic, but that things will more or less level out in the end. The increased bounce rates on those AdWords landing pages from “accidental” clicks should raise a few eyebrows, though.

Emily

I like the new look as a user. However for SEO purposes, I find it to be less effective. I work in the real estate SEO industry and I find the title issue to be a little more than annoying. Most, if not all of our titles are optimized for 69 characters (approximately) so now the majority are cut off by dots. I find it to be a bit unprofessional to have the dots because you can certainly say what you need to say in the new standard they rolled out but it’s just a long process of going through each site and fixing them.

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